Promoting jme3 on Youtube and other sites

Site & Project
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Hey :smiley:,

the other day i had a thought that i think might be really important for the future of jme3.(let me know what you think) :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:
The promotion of the engine on youtube and other sites is kind of a part of a cycle that works for us or against us.
What i mean with that:
More promotion on Youtube(or other sites) → more new Developers → more Engine features + and more new games → which leads to more promotion on Youtube…
Less Promotion on Youtube → less new Developers → less new Engine features + and less new games. → less promotion on Youtube.
So in my Opinion the Amount of Promotion we have on Youtube will massively impact jme3 in say 3 years or so which is why i think its really important:

Here are some Ideas i have brainstormed to help with promotion and boost jme3 future Power! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

1.) Regular Top 10 or Top x Videos with the coolest jme3 Games in General or of a Specific Genre.
(as Top 10 Videos seem to get promoted well by the youtube algorithm)
Perhaps make a Contest for best Promotional Video of the Quarter? and display it one the site?

2.) Making a Video for each of the jme3 Beginner Tutorial → into a Playlist.
A good way of getting new Developers to come from Youtube.

3.) Asking jme3 Projectcreators to make Tutorials. Example:
Ask Makers of Mythruna to pls make a “How to create a Minecraft clone in 30 Minutes with jme3” tutorial etc. Im sure you can come up with good ideas :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Maybe we can get the Ball rolling to boost Youtube Promotion.
I know most of you are probably Programmers and less experienced with making Youtube Videos etc. (i sure am ;P) but see it as practice for promoting your own game :smiley:

Please let me know what you think.

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LOL. Easy. Step 1: download minecraft. Step 2: play minecraft. There is no 30 minute path to a minecraft clone. Sorry.

Plus, my time is 110% booked unless someone wants to put me on contract. I doubt it would be worth the price, though.

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Well the general message is that maybe for those activly Developing the jme3 core, it might be equally important to put videos on youtube as it is to add code to the codebase.

Hm. thought with the “Cubes” contribution from destroflyer and the jme3 engine it should be possible to make a simple minecraft clone in less than 30 minutes. (which might interest new Developers comming into jme3)

Anyway im not saying my ideas are necessarily great.
Just a starting point to think about jme3 on youtube.

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IMHO to help promotion of jme on youtube : you can provide some guide with tips, conventions to create a “good” video for jME.

Conventions like:

  • using a jme “powered by” logo or end screen (which one)
  • agree on using the same tag “jMonkey Engine (Video Game Engine)” or JMonkeyEngine or …
  • agree on using the same keywork/name in title description : jMonkeyEngine, jmonkeyengine, jme3, …
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But this completely misunderstands the various goals of open source developers. I honestly don’t care about youtube promotion, personally. It does absolutely nothing useful for me. Others will feel differently about it and can promote as they like. I will continue to tag my own videos with the jMonkeyEngine tag and I suggest others do the same. I personally have no desire to promote beyond that.

From my perspective, getting “any random new user” is not really helpful on its own. For the code to evolve, we need knowledgable developers as part of the community and they won’t find us from a video on youtube. I never once saw or sought videos before using JME. I plugged “Java openGL” into a search engine.

That’s not to say that I follow some elitist perspective that we should turn away all new users that won’t contribute… but your premise was that this will be “good for the development of the engine”. And that’s not really true.

a) I didn’t develop that so I don’t know why I (the creator of Mythruna) would want to go through the hell of supporting/promoting someone else’s code that I have no vested interest in… better to let the creators of said code do that.

b) it’s only one tiny piece of a minecraft clone. It generates the mesh. You still have to have all of the paging infastructure, etc… Minecraft clones are some of the hardest types of games to write. Making it look even simpler does no one any favors.

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But isn’t the random new user from today not perhaps the knowledgable developer from tomorrow?
(or say a ratio of 10 random users → 1 knowledgeable dev.)

I don’t really want to argue with you :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: the above are just general ideas that anyone could implement or come up with spin off ideas of their own.

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I did a Closer Look at post a month or two ago about jMonkeyEngine on YouTube if it helps. You’re easiest start program might be to gather together existing videos into a playlist and promoting that. Of course convincing people to use a “Powered by” splash is certainly a good step too.

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Nice Idea
You made the channel Gamefromscratch?
I totally dig your Playlist “Unreal Vs Unity Tutorial Series:”. Totally going to check it out when i have time :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Just created a Playlist:

“8 cool Games built with the Open source Gameengine jme3”

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Keep trending!

(or how media and PR people say today - I don’t know! :chimpanzee_closedlaugh:slight_smile:

I liked the two jME mashup videos that @erlend_sh and others organized:
2015. - jMonkeyEngine WIPs mashup - YouTube
2013. - jMonkeyEngine 3 - Prototypes & Alphas Mashup - YouTube

Have Fun,

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It’s more like 1000 to 1. As strongly hinted, the developers who will help most wouldn’t have found us from a youtube video.

But anyway… I’m not trying to poo-poo the idea in general but you demanded time from the core developers. That’s a bit like showing up to a dinner party and telling the hosts they should be making different kinds of food.

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Thanks pspeed.

Now i totally get your reasoning from above.
And im sure you’ve got more experience with that than i do :smiley:

Sorry if i sounded a bit arrogant above. Guess i just overestimated Youtube promo.
Just seems a bit like its dead on Youtube, while the Jme3 Forums are super active.

Still want to find a way to get more new Developers into jme3. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: Should be possible
jme3 is awesome :smiley:

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FWIW we just discussed a thread about more video tutorials and such.

Also, the amount of people that come to JME will probably not impact the Core Dev’s time positively at all. They do JME for themselves, and for the hardcore community. If noobs came, they would be spending time answering noob questions, and most likely not at all. Which would then impact us who have been working with JME for years.

If you were to post a video “how to do a minecraft clone in 30 mins” we would have an influx of noobs with ZERO programming knowledge, and our precious forums would be flooded with people who will be asking how to start a program, because they have no experience in Java. Which, again, will impact us, because our questions will be left unseen.

If people are serious about game dev, they will find JME, that’s how I found it… I wanted something powerful, something that could do anything I could throw at it. There were a lot of choices, but JME was the clear winner.

You also said

You then ask the devs to put up youtube tutorials. If the devs are spending their time on youtube tutorials, how can they then spend their time developing the engine?

I do understand your reasoning that more people who use a product, more will be put into that product, but that always isn’t the case. The development team’s time and size matter greatly in how much they can spend on features.

Also, from another topic I made about “blockworld games” like Minecraft, you will see that people in the thread say they are one of the hardest games to make, even though most developers think they are easy, and try to make them.

Remember, a lot of people want to make games, but JME isn’t a kid’s toy. It’s a professional grade application meant for people who know what they are doing. If you want to “make a game” without any knowledge, use something like “Game Maker” or another drag and drop easy to do gaming environment.

You asked to make a video about a “Minecraft clone” in 30 minutes… If it was possible to make a game in any of these engines in 30 mins, then the market would be flooded with so many more games. Game creation isn’t easy, unless you want to use Game Maker, or some other basic game creator. But those are usually 2d and not very good.

Good luck

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I appreciate the enthusiasm @emtonsit. I’d love to do more promotion, but these days, with full-time employment to keep up with, jME work for me happens in bursts instead of being spread out evenly, so doing something like the mashup video I did recently is a big commitment that I have to set aside time for.

If you’d like to try your hand at some video editing, please do! It’s incredibly easy to get something half-decent working with minimal experience, and there are plenty of high quality video editors for Linux. Let me know if you’re interested in making a video and I can help with a bit more guidance.

Another promo-thing I also always wanted to see more of is the Monthly Screenshots. Anyone could grab all the pictures posted there and make a monthly gallery showing off the efforts of the past month. Someone might even be able to make a little program that utilises the Discourse API and automates the whole process.

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I have the gear to be able to quickly do some slideshows and videos and such.

As for Discourse… I notice that’s what the forum has been using… (with all of the issues people have been getting)…

Unless you just want it to be part of the site or something, but I think there might be better ways to go about this?

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I think the issues are not with discourse itself but with the throttling that apache is doing ahead of it.

I think such throttling for an AJAX based site is probably going to cause issues.

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Thanks for the great Answers.

@erlend_sh Great Idea! Would be a really cool Project to make a Webpage that gives a nice overview over the different monthly screenshot posts. Would be great practice to getting my AngularJS skills up to par :smiley: Have a Javabot go through the Monthly posts, sort by likes and then display in a cool gallery. Not quite sure what the Discourse API is though. On Github it looked to me like Software that helps me process a html Page and login?

Im a crappy Video editor but thats a skill i want to learn anyway. Kinda important skill if i want to ever advertise my own games. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

I think il give that monthly gallery overview a try when i can find the time (also full time emplyed now :smiley: )

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Cool! You (or anyone else who’d like to give it a try) will probably need these:

Another useful trick, which might let you bypass the API completely if you so please, is that you can replace t/name-of-topic with raw and you get plaintext links like these:

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/raw/34442/

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/raw/34442/6

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/raw/34442/14

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Awesome! this looks really cool. Can’t wait to try it out :smiley:

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The monthly gallery is a really cool idea, if you want my help i’m in.

I think it could be made entirely client side, since monthly screenshot threads have all the same title structure, so you can get the thread id by making a request to

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/`MONTH`-`YEAR`-monthly-wip-screenshot-thread

or

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/`MONTH`-monthly-wip-screenshot-thread

for 2013 threads.
And then you just have to parse the reply of /raw/id/* requests.

EDIT:

http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/t/`id`.json

This also return score value for each post, i’m not sure if that is somehow related with likes

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You could use something like “JSoup” to read the pages and get the information to post.

It should be a client-server application if it wants to be automatic, and I’m not sure if grabbing data from the web constitutes “client-server” or not, as we aren’t technically grabbing data from our servers, but JME’s site.